computer science education
There are 51 entries for the tag
computer science education
For the past ten months, I have been waiting and waiting sometimes patiently and sometimes not so patient for the DreamSpark program to be available to high school students. Back in February with a huge announcement by Bill Gates about the DreamSpark program, I have been waiting. So here's the program: The Microsoft DreamSpark student program www.DreamSpark.com makes available, at no charge, a broad range of development and design software for download. The program is now available to more than 35...
At the Marriott Hotel in San Antonio, TX, there were close to 200 teachers from across the world attending the annual Computer Science Teachers Association Symposium. I have been fortunate to attend this event in the past as an attendee and as a speaker and I always look forward to it every year. I enjoy meeting new teachers and talking to them about what they are doing in the class. I also enjoy seeing old friends and the opportunity to learn something new at this event. My presentation was on Web...
On Saturday, I'll be speaking to a group of teachers about how I use the open source portal DotNetNuke in my class. The event takes place in San Antonio and is sponsored by the Computer Science Teachers Association. The Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium provides professional development opportunities for high school and middle school computer science and computer applications teachers who need practical, relevant information to help them prepare their students for the future....
Next week is the last week of teaching XNA Game Development to my students. My year long planning for the course has really paid off and I'm proud of the 2D games that my students created. All of the games were deployed on the XBOX 360 to show the game play. I've posted some of the games that they created and I hope you like them too. Here are some DO's and Don'ts when teaching XNA. Do's Stick with one version of XNA and use it for the Semester. Teach your students the art of game design. Prepare...
Well, my advanced programming students finally have a 2d shooter game that they have almost completed. It's been fun watching the development of their games. Some students are tweaking their sprite graphic, some are adding different sounds. Dan Waters from Microsoft will be coming to speak to my students on Tuesday about the new XNA framework that will allow you to create a game for a Zune. Dan has a great blog on XNA and I used his resources during the semester. I have been experiencing deploying...
Today was extremely busy and exhausting as well. The routine here is to wake up early, grab a boxed breakfast and coffee in the huge ballroom at the hotel and then run off to where the buses are parked to take you to the Redmond Microsoft campus. I scheduled meetings with some Microsoft personnel today along with poking my head into some of the sessions that were going on at the Conference Center. I continued to evangelize computer science education and spoke with interested people about the concerns...
My students have learned enough XNA for them to be able to create their own 2d game. They are ready and anxious. One of the requirements was for them to give me an idea of what the game will be and what will be the game play. So, as we start to develop these games, here's a list of what they will be doing: Helicopter Frenzy- The object of this game is for the player to make it pass all the enemies with a certain score. The players will need to be able to move and fire the helicopter at the same time....
Well, we are in the home stretch of our learning of XNA. We have used the excellent tutorial by Charles Cook that is located on the XNA creators club site. Beginner's Guide to XNA Game Studio Express This all-in-one tutorial is everything you need to get started with XNA Game Studio Express. Follow along with in-depth video tutorials with source code examples to learn how to create 2D and 3D games from scratch. I'm hoping this tutorial can get updated to XNA version 2. My students concentrated on...
I really like it when students discover things on their own and get excited about their own learning. This week, my students have been modifying an existing XNA Pong game. They have just learned the concepts of putting sprites on the screen, moving sprites, and sprite collision. There were two games they could select and some selected the game Dan Waters put together on his blog and the other was from Bill Reiss. Basically, they had to change game play in the pong game. Some added more paddles, changed...
According to the Washington Post, industry executives fear there won't be enough new defense sector workers to replace those employees as they retire. The problem is that almost 60 percent of U.S. aerospace workers in 2007 were 45 or older could affect national security and even close the door on commercial products that start out as military technology, industry officials said. Another part of the problem is the fierce competition for a limited pool of math and science experts from all corners of...
On Friday, I attended a workshop that was held at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. Rollins is an excellent Liberal Arts College which is always highly ranked in the US News Report and is also known for the Crummer MBA School. Over 100 high school teachers in Florida were invited to this event. Dr. Lewis Duncan, President of Rollins College spoke to us about his experiences teaching the Sciences and on some of the problems that he sees with students not interested in the Sciences. After his talk,...
For the past several weeks, my students have learned C# and started to learn XNA by reviewing the tutorial that Microsoft MVP Bill Reiss put together on his site. Today, we reviewed how to put sound into the game. The XNA Creators Club has a good video on this topic. I would highly recommend using the Sound.cs file that Bill uses in his tutorial for you to create your own sounds using XACT. You just need to change the namespace to the project you are working on and then initialize the sound under...
Big announcement at the GDC in San Francisco today. Microsoft has launched a community driven service that will let amateur creators build and distribute games via XBOX live. I was amazed to find out that XNA had been downloaded 800,000 times and there are more than 400 universities worldwide that are using the package. There are not that many high schools teaching XNA. I'd like to see more XNA training for faculty so that high school teachers would feel comfortable teaching it. Last summer, I took...
Today in class, I shared with my students a video that Logan and Buzz did in their XNA online Programming class located at 3dbuzz.com. The training was excellent preparation for me to be able to teach my students game programing. My students have learned how to program in C# ,the basic concepts of decision making, repetition etc. and needed to see how all of this applies to game play so the Bouncing X video was needed at this time. There are 2 class files that are created in this application. One...
Over at the creators club site is an online video tutorial entitled Beginner's Guide to XNA Game Studio Express that is new and will teach you how to create a 2d and 3d game. Charles Cox, a Developer Educator from Microsoft does an outstanding job at explaining how to code these two games. In addition, he reviews the hardware and operating system requirements of being able to run XNA Game Studio Express and how to install as well. What I liked was part of the Introduction steps you through how to...
It's hard to believe that we started this class a month ago and we are moving along to finish the C# learning before we begin our adventure to learning XNA. Students are programming assignments utilizing the if statement. We reviewed the switch statement and how that is used as well. In addition, we covered webcast 3 overview of Game Elements that Digipen has available. This webcasts covers graphics, input, sounds and networks. My students only have time to program 2d games in XNA but I wanted to...
Tech night 08 was a great success last night in the Lakefront room at LHPS. There were close to 50 students and parents in attendance to listen to Andrea Barr from Apple who talked about Podcasting. Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel talked about Tech Tips for students. Richard Connor from Laptop Plus dove into pc security and finally Dan Waters from Microsoft talked about the tablet pc and Onenote software. Lots of information in two hours time. Thanks to Microsoft for the donation of an XBOX...
If you are teaching a web design class and if you want your students to learn how to create a web portal using open source software called dotnetnuke then there is some curriculum that you can have for free. There's even a forum to post questions and you can download videos of the lessons to use to learn dotnetnuke. The curriculum will have your students create a web portal for Comp Sci High School. They will create pages and add modules to those pages. In addition, they will learn how to skin modules...
According to TechSmith, JING is a project and not a product. Whatever they want to call it, JING is an excellent communication tool where you can capture a screen, add your voice and voila you have yourself a movie file to share with anyone. In education, this is great. For example, I can use this on any of my powerpoint slides or software demos that I use in class and put them on my website for students to view as a review. What's even better is that you save on 200 MB of space provided to you by...
All of my students went on a field trip today to visit the Orlando Science Center and participate in workshops that instructors from the Full Sail School in Winter Park, FL put on. The Instructors were extremely knowledgeable and had a great deal of patience answering questions from teenagers. The Science Center sponsored Otronicon over the weekend and the field trips were part of it. One workshop was on 3d modeling with Maya software and the other was on designing games using FPS Creator. Students...
I am trying to explore how I can expose my high school students to silverlight but I'm not sure what direction would be the easiest for them. For example, I realize that there are several versions of silverlight available at this time and that there are several ways to create applications with silverlight. JavaScript, Expression Blend and now the .NET Framework. What I don't know is what direction I should go so now I'm asking the experts. What should I be looking at and where can I go to learn....
The alliance that I'm referring to is the Microsoft Academic Alliance which allows any high school computer science department and computer science students to install Visual Studio. In addition, you get the following: Three Microsoft e-Learning Library (MELL) collections: General Programming Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Programming in Visual Basic .NET Teaching Tools CD Student Tools CD Teaching Tools Manual Student Tools Manual Introductory Kit Monitored Newsgroups MSDN Library Documentation Technical...
Today, I purchased my tickets to go to Seattle for the MVP Summit which will be held in April. The MVP Global Summit is a four-day invitation-only event hosted at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center in Seattle and at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. With more than 400 sessions and a variety of networking opportunities, the MVP Global Summit enables Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and Regional Directors (RDs) to: Connect with other MVPs and RDs Engage with Microsoft...
Next week our class will be talking about the taxonomy of games. I showed students some XNA games and told them that we will be learning XNA by the end of February. Lots of C# learning ahead like decision making, repetition, classes, structs and arrays. Students will be learning about collision with the Brix Game that they are programming. They will replace some code to make the bricks disappear upon collision. Needless to say, the motivation of my students is up and we are moving forward. We have...
In my Honors Programming I class this semester I have 18 students. Ten males and eight females. I'm extremely happy because this is the largest amount of females that I've had in a programming class. We are starting to use Alice and already I can see the excitement of all students working with the software. Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching...
I was telling my students last week about my experience being a Microsoft MVP and a student of mine told me that his goal was to be an MVP. I told him about the two high school students that I met that were MVP's and what they were involved in. I was extremely happy that this student was motivated to learn more about becoming an MVP and I hope he pursues this. Nikita Polyakov who is a student at the University of South Florida and a Microsoft MVP blogs about his experience. The Microsoft Channel...
In my game programming class next week, my students will be learning about C# data types and working with variables. I have several small programs for them to program so that they feel comfortable programming in C# and working with the IDE. These are console applications and will be easy for them to master. The students will start to learn how to program a basic windows game called BRIX. Here's a description of the game. Game Design Overview As its name implies, this is a Windows-based game named...
I am looking for student artists to create some game sprites that my students could possibly use in their game projects. Ideally, I'd like to create a public domain library of game sprites for anyone to download and use in their game. Full credit will be given to the designer. On that same note, I'm looking for student musicians to create game sound files that could be used in a game. These files would also be put in a public domain library. Please let me know if you can provide this to our game...
I've only taught my Honors Programming II Game Programming class for 3 days now and I'm evaluating my students C# skills with various beginner programs. In addition, I am introducing Gaming concepts with my students using the free online book called The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford. I am also using some the Video Gaming Webcast that Microsoft has available with Matthew Mead who is a Computer Science Instructor from Digipen Institute of Technology. The Webcasts does not cover XNA...
Here is an outline of the Honors Programming II class that I'll be teaching next semester which begins next week. The curriculum that I'll be using for C# was written by Digipen and Microsoft. Introduction to C# C# Types & Variables C# Input & Output C# Expressions & Operators C# Functions & Flow Control C# Classes C# Arrays C# Structures The curriculum that I'll be using for some of the XNA training will come from Bill Reiss and Blue Rose Games. Introduction to XNA Getting Started...
O)rlando Elec(tron)ic (I)nteractive Entertainment (Con)vention The inaugural event in 2006 attracted more than 16,000 to experience how the cultural phenomenon of video games is changing everything from art to education to business to military training. Otronicon is uniquely Orlando and spotlights Central Florida's growing digital media industry. Last year's event in January 2007 attracted an incredibly diverse audience of 18,000, including parents with kids, grandparents with grandchildren, couples,...
I Support Learning Inc. has some new curriculum that is worth looking at if you are interested in updating your web design class curriculum. I have always been a fan of simulated learning and this product fits into that category. Students are interns for a company called Ingenious Student Labs. As interns, they are given the task of creating a video game for CarbonAde, a company that produces and promotes healthier drink choices. There are 7 Phases of learning that the student will follow. Phase...
I've been teaching web design since 1994. My first class used notepad and wrote the html tags for the school website. Now there are several tools like Dreamweaver and Expression Web that can be used in class to make web design a fun task instead of a tedious one. I've been wondering for a long time now if I should still be teaching html to my students. Normally, I've used this site for the training and I only teach them how to add text, pictures and links using html. So what do you think? Is it worth...
Dan Waters who is the new Microsoft Academics Relations Manager for the Gulf States has a nice blog entry on creating your first XNA game that I plan on using with my high school programming students. Dan walks you through in his tutorial on how to create his version of a pong game. He does a good job explaining the code and how he used collision detection with his sprites as well. What I liked was a nice powerpoint presentation that you get when you download the source. Dan spent some time creating...
It is great to see that Microsoft has selected some worth projects and has awarded lots of money for continued research on these areas. Here's the announcement: Microsoft Research announced on Monday that Microsoft will award almost $6.5 million in grants to colleges and universities across the United States to supplement research, research faculty, and research facilities. Microsoft Research's Rich Rashid said computer science impacts all types of work and industries, and investing in academia will...
Back in February I blogged about me going to the Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development which was held in Orlando and on the Disney Wonder Ship which took us to the Bahamas. Several of the speakers have put up their slides from their presentation on the Academic Resource Center site. You can search for other information on the site as well. It is categorized like this: Special Collaboration Areas Compilers, Languages, Runtimes Robotics Embedded Systems Sensor Networks Gaming and Graphics Software...
Yesterday I attended the Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium that was held at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. For the past several years, I've been a speaker at this event and this was the second time that I've attended as a registrant. I always look forward to this event because it gives me a chance to see some old friends and to meet new friends as well. In addition, it helps me learn new ways to teach computer science education. I attended sessions on robotics, the Grid...
As a kid, I always had fond memories of my Dad throwing me a popfly ball and catching it. That was fun! Even with my own kids, I enjoyed throwing a popfly ball to them and smiled when they caught it. So, when I was invited to join up with Microsoft Popfly, I had a hunch it would be fun and it is. Popfly Space is a social network designed to connect the millions of non-professional creators in the world who work on everything from mashups to game development to hardware hacks. Users can build and...
Recently, I blogged about Alice and since then I've been exploring the different books that you can get to use while teaching Alice. The book that I'll be using with my students is called Learning to Program with Alice by Wanda Dunn, Stephen Cooper, and Randy Pausch. ISBN 0-13-187289-3 Pearson Prentice Hall. The book comes with instructor resources and sample syllabi which I found to be very helpful. The book is broken down into 4 parts. Part 1 is an Introduction to Alice; Part 2 Object-Oriented...
I finally put the finishing touches on the course that I'll be teaching next school year on game programming. This will be an 18 week course for students who are experienced at programming and have taken our Honors level Programming course. I plan on using the online book The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford. The book is a short read but covers some key points such as: What is a Game? Why do People Play Games A Taxonomy of Computer Games The Computer as a Game Technology The Game Design...
Alice is a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world. Although computer programming has existed in its modern form for half a century, it still eludes all but a small fraction of society. While programming is an inherently difficult activity, there are...
Alfred Thompson, a former high school computer science teacher and now a Microsoft employee, blogged today on taking a look at AP Computer Science. Quite timely I thought even after I posed this question last week to Microsoft boss Bill Gates, "Is computer science education dead". Quite timely indeed even after I said something to my Associate Director here at school on Friday about how frustrated I am teaching AP Computer Science and that when our school hires another Computer Science Teacher next...
At the Microsoft MVP summit today, Bill Gates gave the keynote to 1800 MVP award recipients from all over the world. Before the session, many people were already in line. My thoughts were to eat breakfast fast and then get in line to get a good seat. In line it was a great experience for me to be able to be with people from all over the world. In front of me were a group from Brazil and they have a great sense of humor even though I had no clue what they were speaking in Portugese. To my right side...
The 2nd semester of the school year starts next week after a two week hiatus to rest, relax, and be with family. Most of my classes are semester long classes so I get a chance to meet new students when I go back to school next week. My AP students will be the same and there's always pressure with that class to meet the goals of the AP curriculum and prepare them for the AP exam in early May. They have much more to learn in OOP like inheritance, polymorphism, and they need to learn about recursion...
Mayor Budy Dyer has signed a proclamtion that recognizes Friday, December 8th as Computer Science Education Day. You can view the proclamation here
At Lake Highland Prep in Orlando, FL, we'll be celebrating Computer Science Education in a couple of ways. I have some outstanding guest speakers that will be visiting our school and talking to our students. Scott Faris will be talking to my AP class about his company. Mrs. Frank who runs a very successful online business selling childrens clothes will be coming in to speak to my Web Design class. Finally, Joe Healy, from Microsoft will be bringing Bill Reiss from Tampa to speak to my Honors Programming...
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. Since 1947 ACM has provided a vital forum for the exchange of information, ideas, and discoveries. Today, ACM serves a membership of computing professionals and students in more than 100 countries in all areas of industry, academia, and government. I have been a member of this association for several years now and have met colleagues at the annual conference sponsored by SIGCSE...
Thanks to the following teachers who volunteered to help me work on the Computer Science Education day. Judith Hromcik Arlington High School Tom Indelicato Bishop Guertin High School Susan Canaga Liberty High School Pat Phillips mainfunction.com Reg Hahne Marriotts Ridge High Dan Forhan St. Peter Marian High School More teachers are welcome to join us. I'm still looking for industry volunteers to help out. I'm also looking for a printing company that could donate the printing up of posters. Anyone...
I started to create a site to celebrate Computer Science Education Day which will be held on December 8th to celebrate Grace Hopper's birthday. I'm looking for volunteers to help me coordinate this nationwide event. Remember the it takes a village talk? Well, I could use the help. I'm looking for computer professionals and teachers to help out. Please e-mail me bscarbeau@lhps.org if your interested. I hope you are! Thanks...
My idea about celebrating Computer Science Education Day on December 8th and with Daryll McDade's idea to celebrate Grace Hopper's Birthday seems to be catching on. I will be working with my colleagues at the Microsoft Faculty Advisory Board to help me organize activities that can be held that day for students. I'd like to have a poster contest of Grace Hopper's accomplishments along with an essay contest. I'm trying to get the Computer Science Teachers Association to support this idea as well. I'm...
As I was walking past our school library this week I noticed that it’s Latin week. During the school year at Lake Highland Preparatory School we celebrate many events that has to do with different disciplines and I’m sure your school must as well. Days like Cinco De Mayo, Chinese New Year, etc. so I was thinking that we should do something school wide to celebrate Computer Science Education. As a member of the Faculty Advisory Board for Microsoft Corporation, my first thought was to send the group...